Saturday, March 15, 2014

Last Mile Tip #1 – Just “Knock-Out” or Keep a List of the “Easy Stuff”

As you are building your app, there are many times that you come across something that needs to be done, but seems so easy it’s really a distraction of getting the primary functionality done.

Of course you don’t want to be pulled in too many directions while you’re building a large app, but these “Little/Easy Tasks” can really add up or uncover some other major work you don’t realize that you’ll need to do.

My strategy for dealing with these sorts of things is if they are easy and I think I’ll be able to get done in under 5 minutes, I’ll just go ahead and try to complete. These aren’t things that you know you’ll have do like “Create A Forgot Password Feature”, this is stuff like “Need a clearer icon for XYZ” or “Add validation for emails addresses to sign up screen”. If I know it will take a little while but I still consider it some of the “Easy Stuff” I’ll get to once everything else is done, I put in a list. Of course there are lots of tools out there to help with this, but if you just want to get started, create a simple Misc.txt or Todo.txt as a text file in your solution or project.

Obviously you can get fairly advanced how you compile and organize our lists, but get started, today, I mean right now on the application you are working on. If you come across something easy you want to defer, write it down, you’ll be surprised how quickly this list adds up.

Bonus points for keeping this under revision control with the rest of your source files.